Almost every classroom has a student, or students, that won’t try something new because they are afraid of failure. Teaching students to take chances and try something new is really challenging. Even more challenging, is helping our young learners develop a growth mindset that will allow them to take risks and feel confident. This week, the blog is spotlighting The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett. This book is a great resource for teaching these important concepts. Growth mindset is huge in education right now and this book gives teachers a student friendly way to introduce it. - Jodi and the Starts With a Story Team
SUMMARY
In this engaging story, you’ll meet the character Beatrice Bottomwell, who has never made a mistake! She does everything carefully and perfectly, especially each year at the talent show. However, this year as Beatrice performs her act with her hamster, Humbert, she makes her first mistake. She throws her salt shaker in the air only to realize it had pepper inside! The pepper made Humbert sneeze which caused a big mess of Beatrice’s act. Everyone was shocked but Beatrice could not stop laughing! As a result, the audience did too.
Beatrice learns that it is okay to make mistakes and in fact, making mistakes can be fun! This is a great story of growth mindset that is sure to engage young readers.
USE THIS BOOK TO TEACH:
The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes will help teach your students to use a growth mindset and positive self-talk. It is a great book to use to incorporate social emotional learning into your classroom. However, it is also a great mentor text for reading and writing. Take a look and see how you can use this book in your own classroom!
- Visualizing is an important skill when it comes to reading comprehension. Have students practice their visualization skills throughout the story.
- Keep students engaged in the story by encouraging them to make predictions about the events in the story. This skill also helps students make connections between their prior knowledge and the text.
- Teach students about opinion writing and persuading their reader. Students will get practice generating reasons to back up their thoughts.
- List making is a great strategy to get reluctant writers engaged. Have students generate lists relating to the text.
- Instruct students on grammar skills like using contractions and incorporating time order words to their writing.
- Teach students strategies to manage their stress and grow their self esteem.
NO-PREP PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES:
If you are looking for “ready to go” activities for the first day of school, be sure to check out the book companion. With it you’ll receive all of the following resources to align with this specific book:
- comprehension questions
- 30 writing prompts with themed paper
- vocabulary activities
- word study print & go activities
- ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
- social emotional learning discussion topics
- graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
Having something like the book companion for The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes is the ultimate time saver. You won’t have to create student activity pages or come up with lesson ideas, it is all done for you! Teachers can feel confident that they are giving their students high quality instruction across a range of areas.
GET THE PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES
ADDITIONAL BOOK SUGGESTIONS
You and your students will also love these similar books:
- The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires
- The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds
- Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty
- Ish by Peter H. Reynolds
TRY OUT A SAMPLE COMPANION
It's hard to explain how amazing the Starts with a Story book companions are because there is just so much goodness included in each one. It's best if you experience using one for yourself. Sign up below & we'll send you an entire book companion to try out for FREE!
